“Thank you.” I take the umbrella from him. “Are you a pixie too? You don’t smell like one.”
“Thank you, miss.” He seems to stand up straighter. “I am actually a ghoul. Thank you for noticing.”
“Ghoul, huh …” I try to size him up. “Are all pixies—are they all so moody?”
“The royals tend to be. Those who have turned either go insane quickly or remain steady emotionally. I don’t think your fate will be such as hers. She was born this way. Bad blood.” He opens the door for me. “Please give the king my regards. Good luck to you, mistress.”
Go insane quickly? Great. I step outside into the cold rain. “Good luck to you too.”
Behind him Isla calls out, “Bentley! I need cocoa.”
“Thank you.” He rolls his eyes. “As you can tell, for the past hundred years I have needed all the luck I can muster.”
Before he can go, I call out to him myself, doing the same thing that Isla did, only in a nicer way, I hope. “Bentley, do you know where Astley might have gone?”
He cocks his head slightly, appraising me, I think. He hesitates for the briefest of seconds, and then he must decide I am worthy or trustworthy or something, because he licks his lips just the slightest of bits and says, “When he was young and we were here and they would … argue … and his father did not intervene, he often ran. I would be sent to find him. Often he would be at the park.”
“The park?”
“Central Park.”
“Central Park is huge. Where in the park did he go?”
“Bentley!” Isla screeches from the other room.
Bentley jerks as if pulled by an invisible chain. He spirals away from me toward the sitting room where we left Isla.
“Please, Bentley, tell me where …,” I beg.
He pauses, and it’s almost as if there’s another chain yanking him toward me. His face clenches up. It’s like he is being torn between Isla’s wishes and mine.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I cross into the town house again and reach up to him. My fingers graze the fabric sleeve of his suit jacket just as he jerks backward again, backward and away from me.
“Go to Great Hill. There is a meadow, looking toward the Ravine. It will be glamoured, but it is there …” He stumbles back.
I want to stop him, to hold him with me and away from her, but he looks as if having us both need him simultaneously could tear him apart.
He whirls away and topples through the doorway to the room where Isla waits.
“Well, that took you far too long. Where is my cocoa?” she demands.
It isn’t until I am outside in the rain that I realize:
1. Bentley and Isla must be at least a hundred years old.
2. I have no idea what a ghoul is.
3. I have no idea why Astley flipped out like that and left me alone with his mother.
4. I actually have an idea, a clue—a real lead—on how to get to Nick.
I yank out my phone and send a text message to Betty, Devyn, Issie, and Cassidy: Have lead. Met ghoul. Astley missing.
I touch the book. This was totally worth the drama. I resist the urge to kiss it, because basically who knows where it’s been. I sniff at it while a couple staggers by, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, voices high and loud and slurring with booze. The woman keeps singing Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” and laughing hysterically. Once they are past, I bring the book out again. It smells like musty basement and leather but also hope. This is how I will get Nick.
I tuck it carefully into the inside pocket of my jacket and smile up into the rain. I forget to put up the umbrella. I forget about wars and torture and pixies. For a moment I forget about everything except my Nick.
And this moment feels so incredibly good.
17
U.S. federal agents confirm that they have taken over the investigation into the missing Bedford juveniles.
—NEWS CHANNEL 8
I know that I should be thinking about Astley. I know that I should be worrying about how he allegedly killed some other queen, and how he just left me alone with his psycho mother, and how he seems to be in a pretty emotionally fragile state, to say the least. Okay, yeah, that’s an understatement.
I know all this and yet as I step off the curb and lift up my arm to hail one of those cute yellow cabs that are all over this city, it isn’t Astley that I am thinking about. It’s Nick. I am really one step closer to finding him, thanks to Astley.
A cab pulls up. The driver doesn’t even turn. “Where are you going, miss?”
His accent is so lovely. It isn’t Southern like mine. It isn’t old-school Maine, where all the r’s turn into yah’s. It’s from an Arabic-speaking country maybe. Closing my eyes for a second, I let homesickness take over. I miss Charleston and how simple life was there. It was warm. I didn’t know about pixies or weres. My stepdad was alive. There was actual ethnic diversity there. However, there was no Nick, no big good-smelling man with the most beautiful lips and hands in the entire universe.
“Miss?”
The taxi driver’s voice nudges me back into real time.
“Central Park. As close to Great Hill as you can get me,” I say.
My phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket as the cab driver zips down the street, turning fast and hard around a corner. I should probably put my seat belt on, but it’s got something slimy on it. I slide across the seat, check the other one, and click it on. Then I read my text message.
Betty has responded: I can’t believe you just left. Get back here soon and no hero crap. Stay safe.
Yep.
A heavy sigh escapes me before I can stop it. It’s so loud that even the taxicab driver notices it.
“You okay back there, miss?” he asks.
“Yep.”
I start to check out the book. It’s heavy for something so small. The old-fashioned font lies heavy against thick paper that feels more like parchment than book paper. All the ink is dark, except for the first page, where it seems to be made out of gold. The light in the cab is not the greatest. I open up my cell phone so the light from the screen illuminates the book’s title page a little bit better.
The letters aren’t just gold; they glitter like pixie dust. The words read: Pixies: The History and Magic Thereof. It looks like calligraphy, only not so full of loops.
I flip to chapter twelve. My phone vibrates again. I ignore it.
Chapter 12
Valhalla
All the air inside me whooshes out as I stare at the word: Valhalla. There’s all this ornate drawing around the border of the page: vines and ivy and trees. My hands shake, I’m so excited. I turn the page and start to read.
It has of late come upon our notice, not without vast hurt to us, that, in a quantity of parts of upper Britain, as well as in the provinces, cities, territories, and regions of Erin, Scot’s Land, Iceland, Normandy, and the New Lands, many pictsies of both sexes, unmindful of their own origins and forsaking the courts to which they owe their allegiance, are unaware of the existence of Valhalla, and even if aware are unsure of the process by which, alive and breathing, they may venture to its lofty lands.
It’s like reading Latin, only worse.
Sigh.
The phone vibrates again. My mother is calling.
I read on.
We therefore, aspiring, as is our obligation, to eliminate all hindrances in which in any way questors are mired in the exercise of their pursuit of the mythical land, and to avert the failure to even begin such a quest, do herein explicate the procedures by which a hero may enter Valhalla prior to his time.
She wasn’t lying. This is really it. I squee, all happy, and punch the ceiling, which makes the taxi guy cranky. I apologize but don’t really pay attention, because Astley’s face forms itself before me, in my imagination, I guess. His eyes glisten, sad and angry at the same time. His lips move: “Zara.”
“What?” I whisper back.
The taxi driver is basically sh
outing at me. “Miss! We are here. That will be eight fifty.”
“Oh! Right!” I was imagining Astley, just imagining him, which basically means I’m losing it. I tuck the book into my coat pocket, where it’s safe, and yank out my wallet. I give him eleven dollars. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a city that I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to tip.
“Thanks.”
I open up the door and step out onto the wet street. Just standing up hurts me and I hate being so weak—and vulnerable, I realize … I am also vulnerable. The taxi zips away and I am alone. There aren’t even any cars here. There is just me. The cabbie has let me out on West Ninety-Sixth Street, I think, and I head north, crossing over into the park at West One Hundredth Street. Sniffing the air for threats, I head up the hill. There are signs, which is nice. My breath hitches like I’m really out of shape. The rain turns completely to wet snow as I walk. Giant flakes stick to my hair and jacket.
Scurrying noises lurk off to my right, in some bushes just before the crest of the hill. My skin crawls. Rats. The fear of rats is murophobia. The fear of night is noctiphobia. The fear of snow? Chinophobia. I am a pixie. I shouldn’t be afraid of any of these things, but I’ve got to tell you, rats make me squirmy.
“I am a pixie,” I mutter under my breath. “I am a pixie who is going to save her boyfriend and there is nothing to be scared of. I am the thing to be scared of.”
I wish I could believe this more. Reaching inside my jacket, I touch the book. It makes me feel safer. It is hope.
It’s like suddenly being in a nighttime fairy tale. There’s this calm, tiny lake surrounded by lawns and trees. At one end are the shadows of a gentle little waterfall. At the other end is another waterfall that sloshes into a loch. I follow the path on the west side and then head up a staircase. There’s a garden with winding trails. I basically get lost for a while before I finally stand on the top of Great Hill and I see … not much. It’s pretty dark. A meadow rests against the earth and there’s a dirt running track. It’s about one-fifth of a mile and it loops around. It looks like a really nice track, actually, the kind that wouldn’t make your knees scream and ache even after you’ve gone ten miles. There’s a restroom with a CLOSED sign. I don’t see Astley anywhere. What had Bentley said? Look toward the Ravine? There was a glamour? I don’t even know where the Ravine is.
I try to focus, will myself to see the truth beyond the illusion, which is the trick in seeing a glamour. You look for a shadow that doesn’t seem like it quite belongs. Sometimes it’s not a shadow. Sometimes it is more of a gleam. I search the grass and get nothing. Then I look up at the trees, and that’s where I see it, just the faintest kind of shimmer, like the tree is not perfectly in focus.
“Astley?” I call.
There’s no answer. I focus hard to make the glamour fade away as I walk closer. The shimmer vanishes and in its place is a house supported in the branches of one of the largest trees. I gasp. The house is made of wood and has a giant window facing outward. Tiny white lights drape all around it and entwine into the branches of the trees. A staircase winds up the trunk of the tree and leads to a porch deck that seems to have roots for railings. It all looks incredibly magical, and I guess it really is, in a pixie way.
I start up the stairs. I have no idea if Astley is actually here, but even if he wasn’t, I’d want to explore. Honestly, it might be cooler if he wasn’t here, because I have no idea what I’m going to say to him about what just happened at his mother’s house and how he abandoned me there, or about what she said. He had another queen and he never told me. Even if he didn’t quote-unquote kill her, that’s a pretty big lie by omission.
Nick did that too. He lied to me when he didn’t tell me that his parents were dead. I never even had a chance to confront him about that. I learned after he was gone.
I pause for a moment, trying to will the pain in my chest to dwindle down, and also so I can think. Why do people and pixies and weres lie so much? Why can’t we all just be honest with each other? It would be so easy to just not trust anyone ever, but you can’t go through life with a pair of scissors in each hand, snip-snip-snipping away at everything people say or don’t say, can you? You have to leave one hand free to catch the truth.
I contemplate my situation for a second. The stairs would normally be easy to climb, but thanks to ye olde gunshot wound they’re proving a bit much for me. Still, I start up again, climbing to the level of the house, which is probably thirty feet or so above the meadow. When my feet hit the deck, the world goes a little wiggly and I almost think I’m going to pass out.
“Pixies don’t pass out,” I mutter. “We are total badasses. We do not pass out.”
Looking through the giant window, I try to spot Astley inside the house. There are globes of light that seem to float at different levels in the air. They cast a soft and mellow glow, like candles. It is the opposite of how I feel inside. What am I doing? I’m confronting another pixie killer, and this one happens to be my king. Brilliant. I am brilliant. Obviously I have a thing for drama now too.
There’s a door in front of me. It’s made of glass and twisted wood that’s been sanded soft and smooth. The handle is wood too and has the face of a horse carved into it. My fingertips touch it before I think about it, caressing the horse’s nose. It almost feels real. The door opens easily. It’s not locked. I step inside and let the door shut behind me, trying to sense if Astley’s here. He is. I can feel his sorrow like a paper cut against my heart.
I don’t see him, though. I look across the living room I’ve stepped into. Unlike his mother’s house, the furniture is all streamlined and modern. It seems expensive, but a different kind of expensive. It’s almost a Japanese feel. I step into the room. My sneaker leaves a wet mark on the floor. There are other wet marks from where Astley must have stepped. I’d follow the glitter trail, but there’s glitter all over the shiny wooden floor—it’s more like someone shook a carton of it over the floor than there being any one traceable trail.
Bamboo-type mats rest on the floor. Water that has dripped off Astley’s clothes darkens the white into gray. I follow the water trail around the squarish white sofa and armchair. He’s in the corner, huddled into the fetal position, perched on the balls of his feet and facing away from me so that all I can see is his back.
“Astley?”
When I say his name, his back shivers, even though I know he’s not surprised. His senses are amazing. He heard and smelled me way before I came inside, probably before I even climbed the stairs. Still, his back moves as if I’ve startled him. Nothing else moves, though.
I try again. “Astley?”
Still no answer. Against my better judgment, I reach forward and gently touch his shoulder. It is hard beneath the leather jacket.
He stands up and turns around so slowly. All my skin crawls. A million spiders seem to run up and down the surface of me. I yank my hand back, touch my face, but there’s nothing on me. It’s him that’s making me feel this way. He turns fully around and he doesn’t look human at all. The glamour is gone. He is in full pixie mode, all blue skin and teeth, eyes that glint. I shudder even though I know that this is how I look too—like a monster. But it’s more than that. He feels like a monster, like some horrible, primal, lethal pixie king instead of the usual calm, slightly troubled Astley.
I back away. I can’t help it.
“Stay,” he commands.
I can’t move. My feet stick to the floor, held by some invisible force that must be coming from him.
“You’re scaring me, Astley,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound scared. It sounds calm.
“Am I?”
Back in 2004, this forty-nine-year-old guy Ye Guozhu was sentenced to prison in China because he applied to demonstrate against forced evictions. The court said he was “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble.” He was upset because people’s homes and businesses were being destroyed so that fancy places could be built. His restaurant was one of those buildings. H
is home was another. The government didn’t give the people any money. They just evicted them.
According to Amnesty, he was tortured. The police beat him before his trial, suspended him from the ceiling, hung him by his arms. According to Amnesty, the police used electroshock batons.
These are the sorts of things out-of-control pixies would do, but worse … even worse. How can I imagine worse? I don’t have to imagine it. I saw it when I rescued Jay Dahlberg from my father’s lair. But pixies can do good. Both Astley’s dad and mine sacrificed themselves for us, and can there be a higher good than that?
Astley winds around me again in a clockwise circle. His hand lifts up to my cheek. His fingernails are claws. Yes, I am scared, but I’m also not scared, because I know he needs me and he’s never been mean to me. But his mother said …
“Did you kill her by accident?” I ask.
He stops. His mouth opens, revealing all those sharklike teeth. His eyes close for a second as if he is suddenly very, very weary of it all. “Why would you say that, Zara?”
“Because I can’t believe you’d just kill someone.”
“You have seen me kill.”
“But only to protect others or in self-defense.”
His hand loses its tension and his forehead tilts and touches my own, resting there. I still can’t move, but I don’t feel like I’m in danger anymore.
“I look like a killer, though, am I correct? With all my pointy teeth, the sharp claws?” He whispers this.
“It’s not about how people look,” I insist. “It’s about what’s on the inside. It’s about our actions.”
“But you forget, Zara. We are not people. We are pixies.”
“Doesn’t matter. The rule still applies.”
He laughs a soft, sad laugh. Just as quickly as the laugh enters the air, it is gone. “You believe things so fiercely.”
“I believe you aren’t evil.”
“Then it must be true.” He moves his forehead off mine. His hands go to my shoulders. “I apologize.”
Just like that, I am no longer restrained. Still, I don’t move away. “Tell me what happened with your queen, Astley.”